Bierlein’s debut collection features familiar, post-Sex and the City storylines, but with glimpses of originality and verve.

Can’t make it to Paris this spring? Don’t worry. Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel, An Unexpected Guest , delivers armchair travel fresh as a fragrant baguette.

With her debut novel, Regina O’Melveny’s heroine embarks on a journey through Renaissance Europe. Indebted to The Bard, the book inhabits many worlds worth exploring.

Michael Griffith’s latest novel captures the last twenty minutes of a man’s life: Vada finishes mowing the lawn, eats cookie dough for lunch, and suffocates under the weight of his friend Wyatt’s stuffed trophy bear. It’s a joke wrapped in a pun inside a pratfall, but this book gives good pathos, too.

Jesús Ángel García’s debut “transmedia” novel, badbadbad is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. Starring a lead character who shares the author’s name, the book follows his descent from devout webmaster to the obsessed savior of a pornographic social network. Also included: a documentary, a soundtrack, a chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

Ever feel like reading genre without, you know, knowing what to expect? Cam Terwilliger on why Percival Everett’s Assumption—one volume, three mystery novellas—will kick your [ahem] assumptions to the curb.

Does the lowly individual stand a chance against the blunt force of the mass? Anita Desai’s novella collection, The Artist of Disappearance, celebrates the wish to be left alone, and the raw agony of the desire to be seen.

A good place to die? Mary François Rockcastle’s second novel In Caddis Wood unfolds as call and response between a husband facing terminal illness, and his wife of more than thirty years. What does it look like to draw strength from a shared past, even as the future dwindles?

The key to the adult is often found in the child. Susan Henderson’s debut novel, Up From the Blue, perfectly balances the two crises of Tillie Harris: the year in childhood when her mother went mad and the present alarm of her premature labor.

Caroline Preston’s fourth novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, recreates the rush of standing in a dusty corner of a used bookstore, flipping through a shoebox of old photos, and finding something that seems to tell a secret story.